


Eru Lee and the Temple of Doom

by The_Carnivorous_Muffin



Series: Minato Namikaze and the Destroyer of Worlds [23]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Naruto
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alternate Universe, Attempted Murder, Female Harry Potter, Gen, Human Sacrifice, Humor, Master of Death Harry Potter, Murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-25
Updated: 2018-08-25
Packaged: 2019-07-02 04:30:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,777
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15789006
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Carnivorous_Muffin/pseuds/The_Carnivorous_Muffin
Summary: Jiraiya and Minato, on returning to Konoha, discover that their beloved hidden village now has a Jashinist problem. Predictably, it's all Lee's fault.





	Eru Lee and the Temple of Doom

**Author's Note:**

> Obligatory note of NOT CANON

Jiraiya and Minato, after weeks on the road in just about every great nation on the map and more than a few of the smaller ones, stood outside the gates of Konoha in dumbfounded horrified fascination. The kind that probably shouldn’t have been warranted, given it was their own village and Jiraiya was in general a rather unflappable shinobi who considered himself well versed in a lot of weird shit, yet somehow was.

 

Finally, Jiraiya muttered under his breath, with a forced casualness that he really wasn’t feeling, “You know, Minato, it’s times like this I almost feel bad for whatever poor bastards are spying on us right now.”

 

Because if Jiraiya had no idea what the hell had happened in the weeks he’d been away or even was happening at this very moment then he doubted any foreign nin would have a clue either. More, this time, had he been from any other village, he’d be far too on edge to even begin putting his thoughts together.

 

But as Jiraiya was from Konoha, and had taught the very kunoichi chunin likely responsible for this unnerving madness, he was somehow, impossibly, able to take it somewhat in stride.

 

Admirably in stride, considering.

 

Because the fact of the matter was that a small village worth of Jashinists were camped outside the village. Yes, Jashinists, dark cloaked, wild eyed, blood thirsty cultist shinobi, with the symbol of Yugakure’s obscure blood thirsty god Jashin tattooed on their bare skin and embroidered on their blood-stained clothing, camped outside of his village and surrounded by the decomposing bodies of Eru Lee’s brutally murdered clones.

 

And, judging by the state of their camp and said clones, some raised upon pikes facing the village and the guards on the outer walls, Konoha had been the Jashinist pilgrim site for a good while now.

 

Possibly since only just after Minato and Jiraiya had left.

 

Somehow, in some inconceivable way, it looked like every goddamn Jashinist that had ever existed had, out of nowhere, decided to haul ass from Yugakure all the way to Konohagakure and, from all appearances, had no intention of leaving anytime soon.

 

More, Jiraiya thought as his dark eyes moved from Konoha’s walls to the Jashinists in question, they were still sitting here, with their rotting clones, when by all right Sarutobi-sensei had probably ordered them driven off the land already. Meaning that either Konoha had tried and failed with all available resources, or, for whatever reason, the sandaime decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

 

And knowing Sarutobi-sensei and the council itself they’d be willing to expend a lot of effort to get rid of the foreign shinobi cultists camped outside the goddamn walls like cannibalistic vultures.

 

Which meant these assholes were about as scary as they looked, except, they also didn’t seem to be doing anything. There was no movement, no sign of a siege against the walls, no they were all just… sitting there, staring at the guards with jagged grins, waiting for… something.

 

So, they’d become this strange tolerated menace, one that the guards watched but did not touch, and all the while a palpable tension could almost be tasted in the air. And, as he’d thought to himself earlier, Jiraiya had no clue what the hell was going on.

 

Slowly, carefully, Jiraiya took in a breath and keeping his eyes forward, walked with Minato down the road, past all the Jashinists who turned their heads to look at the pair of them, taking them in piece by piece, the glazed eyes of his former genin student’s clones staring down on him with the agony of painful death written across her pale features.

 

All the while his hands twitched at his sides, his heart thrumming beneath his chest, and that battle adrenaline already taking hold of his thoughts as he unconsciously searched for flashes of metal, for hands moving together, the flight of a senbon in the air. However, though he heard the crunch of his own sandals against the dirt, Minato’s shallow breathing beside him, there was no movment from their dark eyed friends.

 

Jiraiya and Minato reached the gate, quietly relayed their numbers, watched as the guard checked them (his eyes also lingering behind them, on the mob, waiting and watching), and then with that same forced slowness, forced calm, both finally stepped through the gates and heard them shut and lock behind them.

 

Both, for a moment, stood there, blinking in the midday sunlight, and only with the chirping of the birds and the relatively normal scene of Konoha before them, did Jiraiya and Minato both release a great sigh of relief.

 

“Sensei,” Minato said, slowly, like he was tasting the words even as he said them, “I suggest you title your new book, ‘Eru Lee and the Temple of Doom.”

 

It said far too much that Jiraiya found that hilarious, it said even more that he doubled over, trying to catch his breath between the bouts of hysterical laughter without a care in the world for who was watching.

 

* * *

 

Surprisingly, they found Lee before she could find them.

 

Normally, whenever Jiraiya and Minato returned from their extended trips across the continent and beyond, Lee was always right beside the gate, eagerly telling Minato of her own adventures as apprentice to Hatake Sakumo (mundain, ridiculous, or anything in between) and go-to babysitter for Hatake Kakashi (a venture somehow more terrifying and with seemingly further reaching consequences than being a chunin) and then listening to whatever had happened to the pair of them on the road (usually Minato virgin complaining about Jiraiya’s ladies of the night).

 

However, this time Lee was conspicuously absent, and it took writing the mission report and turning it in to a rather distracted Sarutobi-sensei (who, for good reason, appeared to have been stuck in meetings for the past few weeks and was fully aware and not in the least appreciative of the Jashinist problem) to receive the muttered, half-thought, suggestion of, “Have you checked the Senju compound” for the pair to track her down and find out just what the hell was happening.

 

And sure enough, upon being invited into the Senju compound by a rather unamused Tsundae (who had announced to anyone that cared that she was going to the bar goddammit because there was only so much gruncle venting that one could take), there was Lee, staring down the nidaime hokage across a table of tea, neither appearing to give any quarter whatsoever.

 

A scene that, between two kages, would perhaps not have been out of place, but between a thirteen-year-old chunin and a retired and resurrected hokage was patently ridiculous. Especially since it wasn’t even an unfamiliar one. Senju Tobirama, in his apparently mind-numbing retirement found personal joy in bringing Jiraiya’s wayward former genin student to task.

 

Though, this time, both the nidaime and Lee seemed oddly intense, more than usual at any rate.

 

In fact, neither of them seemed to notice Minato or Jiraiya entering at all (which for Lee was not only weird but downright alarming, as when it came to Minato, Lee almost had a sixth sense that would be adorable if it wasn’t kind of terrifying.)

 

Finally, with an indomitable spark in her green eyes, Lee coolly broke the silence and stated to the nidaime hokage, “I don’t see how this is my problem.”

 

“I don’t see how it isn’t your problem,” Senju Tobirama responded back, equally coolly and with his trademark chilling temper and dry wit, “More, I don’t see how it isn’t a problem you’ve been avoiding for weeks now.”

 

“Isn’t this above my paygrade?” Lee noted, equally drily now with raised red eyebrows that questioned the nidaime’s very intelligence, “One does not usually see this type of diplomatic nonsense on the resume of a mere chunin.”

 

“Everyone knows that you’re embarrassingly underranked and have been since you were six,” Senju Tobirama quipped back, now thoroughly unamused and slightly annoyed though apparently not personally affronted, “More so, as you’re solely responsible for this madness, I think it’s fair that it’s your sole responsibility to fix it.”

 

“Solely responsible is a strong term,” Lee noted, her usual trademark argument when deep down she knew that she technically had done something but was not willing to admit to it. Other strong terms that had been noted to date were, ‘suicide mission’, ‘rogue clone’, and ‘unmitigated disaster’.

 

“And yet, it is the correct term, as, Eru Lee, you are solely responsible,” and he said this with such serenity that you could almost picture him poised beneath cherry blossoms, sipping his tea and staring out into the fleeting beauty of spring, instead of brow beating an adolescent girl.

 

Lee took a sip of her tea, eyeing the nidaime as she might an opponent in shoji who had just played a rather masterful move, and finally with a sigh changed tactics in favor of bluntness, “I’m not going to tell them what to think or what to believe in, no matter how uncomfortable I happen to find it, and if this is the impasse we’ve reached then we’re all going to have to live with it. No matter how many rotting corpses it happens to produce.”

 

“This isn’t an impasse,” the nidaime scoffed, his serenity apparently gone, “An impasse would require at least some sort or maintainable state, this, whatever you might call it, is hardly maintainable.”

 

“I disagree, that’s the exact definition of an impasse,” Lee responded, “It’s why they’re so… uncomfortable.”

 

Had sneering been in the nidaime’s repertoire of facial expressions he likely would have then, as it was, he managed a half smirk that looked more annoyed than smug as he noted, “Then you agree, that something must be done.”

 

“Perhaps,” Lee commented with a shrug of her shoulders before circling back around to the beginning of the conversation, “But again, I don’t see how it’s my problem.”

 

That, appeared to finally snap the nidaime’s fragile temper as he violently set down his own tea cup, leaned forward and began to hiss out, “Listen to me you little…”

 

Minato stepped forward, held out his hands and interjected awkwardly, “Hello, everyone…”

 

Lee and Tobirama’s heads swiveled towards Minato, finally realizing that Jiraiya and him had been standing there the whole time, and immediately Lee’s entire mood seemed to change as she brightly grinned and waived to the pair of them, “Hey, Minato, I didn’t realize you’d gotten back. How was Tetsu no Kuni or wherever you ended up this time?”

 

Minato offered his own rather embarrassed smile, flushing somewhat and likely still feeling the tension of the previous conversation, as he said, “Oh, it was fine, nothing too unusual though… We couldn’t help but notice, Lee, the large amount of Jashinists camped outside the gates.”

 

Lee immediately deflated and across the table Senju Tobirama sent her a rather smug look, Minato apparently having just aided him in making his point, “Oh, them, yes… That’s a long story.”

 

Jiraiya sighed and decided he might as well sit down, since, likely, it probably was a damn long story, “You know, Lee, before we had that run in with the Jashinists and your rogue clone, I barely even knew what Jashinism was.”

 

“It has always been a rather minor religion,” the nidaime commented before drily adding, “Perhaps out of necessity, given their main tenant is ritualistic murder.”

 

It was more than that though, before they had appeared on that one mission Jiraiya had only thought it was a sort of urban legend, one of those odd folk tales of the relatively peaceful Yugakure. The tale of the bloody cultist shinobi who not only dealt out violence and death in equal measure but reveled in it in such a way that would inspire illness in even the most hardened of ninja, a story seemingly spun from civilian fears and superstition regarding ninja.

 

Until that mission, Jiraiya had never seen or even expected to see one in the flesh.

 

Lee sighed then, eye twitching, pretending to be much less affected than she no doubt was, “Well, for now, at least their ritualistic murder is contained to clones.”

 

“For now,” the nidaime stiffly agreed, with that tone that implied he very much doubted they’d be contained to clones for long and that Lee better get her ass down there and do something about it so help him god.

 

“So, Lee,” Minato started as he too sat down at the table, distracting her attention from the nidaime and prompting her for some kind of an explanation, “You said there was a story?”

 

Lee blinked, blinked again, then sighed and came right out in her usual fashion to just say it, “Right, well, the long and short of it is that I’m now, apparently, an avatar of the Jashinists’ dread god.”

 

Somehow, Jiraiya wasn’t surprised by this, more, looking at Minato, his apprentice wasn’t particularly surprised by it either. That probably wasn’t a good sign, all the same, they both silently sat, and waited for the rest of the explanation.

 

Lee continued with a sigh and a dramatic hand gestured that signaled the beginning of whatever bizarre tale she had for them today, “It all started back about a month ago when Sakumo-shishou and I were out on a mission in Yugakure, which, as it turns out, is not only a hot bed of hot springs but also of murderous ninja cultists who practice evil _voodoo_ ninjutsu (coined as voojutsu by none other than myself for convenience) and sacrifice hapless virgins to their dark cannibal god Jashin…”

 

* * *

 

The prologue to Lee’s tale of cannibals, ritual virgin sacrifices, death by hot springs, the blood of Jashin, and voojutsu was a rather simple one at its surface. The long and short of it, Lee felt, was that Yugakure was filled with pansies.

 

This wasn’t a debatable fact either, like whether or not ramen was the food of kings (it was, but Lee would acknowledge that there were other arguments), but instead a clear non-negotiable fact of life.

 

Yu nins were absolute, undeniable, pacifist, pansies.

 

Konoha had a bit of a reputation among the great five, tree hugger was the common derisive term for it, but good god did Konoha have nothing on Yugakure. Konoha, at the very least, had been involved in wars and still took on missions that had, well, violence involved. Yugakure had become little more than a tourist destination, most of their major missions either diplomatic or escort missions.

 

Now, Lee didn’t think there was anything wrong with pacifism, per se, it was just an interesting stance to take as a hidden village and one that Lee couldn’t see as being good in the long term. Regardless, that was the path that Yu had chosen, and by god they were going to stay on it.

 

Point being, that if you were a village in the Land of Hot Springs and you had a problem with something that wasn’t hot water, then you couldn’t necessarily rely on local ninja to solve it for you.

 

Which was exactly what happened when Lee and Sakumo-shishou were presented a B-ranked mission to investigate the disappearances of several girls from a small village in the Land of Hot Springs, who, having already paid for the services of Yu and seen no results, gathered up what little money they had and threw it at Konoha.

 

Cue a few days later where Lee and Sakumo-shishou were kneeling before the village council on the rickety wooden steps leading to what Lee assumed was the town hall, staring into the fearful eyes of the mob of civilians gathered as the village elder stated with gravitas, “We know who took them.”

 

Lee looked at Sakumo, Sakumo spared a pair of raised silver eyebrows to Lee, then both looked back towards the grave council facing them.

 

“Oh,” Sakumo started, shifting slightly, a warier expression appearing on his face, “I see.”

 

“You wonder why we have hired you to investigate, when we know who it is?” The elder asked, “Well, knowing who it was and knowing how to find them, then bring home whoever is still alive… Those are two very different things.”

 

“So, you want us to find… them,” Lee interjected at this point, a large pause before the unnamed them, but the elder hardly seemed to notice.

 

“It was the Jashinists, of course,” the old man noted before motioning out past the village and towards the various geysers and springs in the distance, “Those devils who use the toxic fog of the hot springs to hide themselves even from the ninja. They have been murdering us now for decades, since the town has existed, an unfortunate son here, a daughter there… However…” he trailed off, almost seeming pained.

 

Jashinist, at the time that sounded familiar, importantly familiar, as if Lee had heard the term at one point but had put it into the back of her head when she really should have kept it front and center. The trouble was there was a lot of things that Lee felt she should keep track of, like plant zombies, those were important, even though they really hadn’t made much of an appearance since that last disastrous encounter on the mission to drag Senju Tsunade back to the village.

 

Still, something about that term nagged at her.

 

It probably wasn’t important, judging by the look on Sakumo’s face he didn’t recognize the term at all. Probably just some obscure thing that Lee had heard somewhere once but then never again, nothing too important, she could always ask Minato whenever he got back from wandering the continent with Jiraiya-sensei.

 

“However, it has gotten worse recently,” Sakumo finished for him, the very epitome of professional.

 

“Yes,” the elder said gravely, “A few miles to the west there was once a village, now there’s nothing but mutilated corpses and charred wood, and even that was not enough to satisfy them. They are… planning something, some new monstrosity, and they’ve taken ten of our daughters so far to do it.”

 

“What is it then, that you specifically want from us?” Sakumo then asked, getting straight to the point, unsaid was that Konoha had not been hired to exterminate murderous vermin who could dodge even local ninja.

 

That sort of shit was A-ranked at the very least.

 

“We do not have the money for you to take our daughters back, we know this,” the man then sighed for a moment, fell silent, then said, “Instead, we ask that you discover where they are hiding, just what it is they’re doing with our people, and, if you can, rescue whoever is still alive. If we hear what it is that they want, we can spread word to other villages, and decide what to do from there.”

 

And that, while perhaps edging A-ranked, was enough to stay safely in the B-ranked range and give Sakumo and Lee enough leeway to get out of dodge should that prove absolutely necessary. So, even sitting there in this impoverished village that seemed on the edge of ruin, Lee didn’t necessarily feel like it would all turn to hell.

 

She probably should have known better.

 

* * *

 

Lee paused in her story, raised her cup, inspected its empty contents, and looked pointedly at the nidaime, “I think we need more tea.”

 

“You’re not getting anymore tea,” the nidaime blandly responded.

 

“Minato and Jiraiya-sensei could use some tea,” Lee said nodding to the pair of them.

 

“Oh, Lee, I really don’t need…” Minato started, holding up his hands in surrender, only for Lee to talk right over him, “Minato can’t listen to my fascinating tale without tea.”

 

“You’re not getting anymore tea,” Senju Tobirama continued, “Quit stalling and get to the point.”

 

“The point,” Lee stated slowly, drumming her fingers against the table, trying to get back to where she was, “Right, the point… Well, there was a few days of searching here and there in the wilderness, tracking them by scent and chakra somehow even with toxic gas everywhere, which actually is damn clever and made it pretty hard to hunt them down…”

 

“Yeah,” Jiraiya interrupted before she could really get going, “Lee, I’m sure that was very impressive and all, but I’m guessing, just guessing, that at some point you ran into the Jashinists themselves.”

 

“Oh, right, that,” Lee sighed, “Well, we came across them, and sure enough they had kidnapped a frightening amount of virgins who they were ritualistically lowering into the boiling hot water, ripping out their hearts, and boiling to death…”

 

 

“Holy shit!” Lee exclaimed, watching the scene before them, or rather the aftermath of cheering cultists letting out a blood curdling cry and a cage being pulled up, steaming, and the corpse of the boiled victim being incinerated by a waiting cultist with a timely jutsu, making way for the next sobbing girl to be shoved into the cage.

 

The cage, for a moment, glowed, fuinjutsu seals lighting themselves and the captured chakra of the dead girl flowing through the bars and onto painted seals on the ground, which in turn led to an upside-down triangle with a circle inside, a man kneeling inside of it, gritting his teeth as the chakra appeared to pour into him.

 

All in all, it was quite the ominous scene and more than enough to have the village worried.

 

However, there was something more than that, something tugging at Lee’s memory until her eyes widened, she leaned forward, and exclaimed quietly to Sakumo-shishou, “It’s the Temple of Doom!”

 

He glanced towards her, eyebrows rising, a questioning look on his face as she whispered towards him, beneath the ever so slight genjutsu she had earlier cast, “It’s Jones Indiana and The Temple of Doom! Look, replace the boiling water with lava, the Land of Hot Springs with _India_ , and Jashinists with a _Thugee_ cult and it’s the scene where they rip out that poor bastard’s heart, drop him in lava, and sacrifice him to Kali!”

 

Lee paused, the reality of the situation catching up with her, or rather Sakumo-shishou’s admonishing look towards her, and stated, “Right, not relevant, got it…”

 

Except, she paused, no, something about that was relevant, extremely relevant. Lee had a flashback, more than a year ago now, to a time and place at the edge of the land of fire on a mission that hadn’t featured plant zombie, and her own words to a group of strangely Catholic cultists after Lee’s Ark of the Covenant…

 

 _“Just to clarify, this isn’t virgin sacrifice, putting me on an altar,_ Gregorian _chanting, summoning some foul demon into my body sort of a sacrifice, is it? Because, honestly, if I’m going to choose my ritualistic sacrificial death, then I’d much prefer the Temple of Doom version, where my heart is ripped from my chest as I’m tied to two posts, eaten by Kali, and then I’m left to burn in lava. You know, if I get a choice…_ ”

 

Lee finished her own words, more than a year later, “Because at least that version has some dignity.”

 

Well, shit.

 

Lee wasn’t sure how she was supposed to feel about the fact that she may, perhaps, have been inadvertently responsible for the gruesome manner of these girls’ deaths. Not that this made much sense since she obliterated the cultists she had seen and there should have been absolutely no way for them to spread word so clearly this was all some terrible coincidence. She also wasn’t sure how she felt about confessing this, perhaps relevant, fact to Sakumo-shishou who even now was looking quite disturbed as he stared down at the scene and ignoring Lee completely.

 

Suddenly, the chakra stealing shirtless man looked over from his position in the center, eyes fixing on Lee and Sakumo, the genjutsu apparently obliterated in Lee’s distraction.

 

“Well, shit,” Lee said, audibly this time, and already Lee and Sakumo were on their feet, kunai out and blazing through the mobbing enemy shinobi who were whipping out several nasty jutsus right from the get go.

 

They quickly made their way backward, ducking through geysers and attempting to use the mist as cover, poor since they were on enemy territory in a land these shinobi had spent their lives training in.

 

The main cultist, the one covered in tattoos, flooding with foreign chakra and killing intent rushed towards them, faster and stronger than all the rest and forcing Sakumo on the defensive. However, striking forward with his katana Sakumo managed to spear him in the ribs.

 

Soon enough though, the purpose of the ritual became clear, as the man didn’t even stumble, instead, with wounds regenerating, struck Sakumo across the head, knocking him out and into Lee with a single blow, Lee’s own head striking against a rock with the leering, hungry, mob as the last thing she saw before the world faded into black.

 

* * *

 

“Now,” Lee interrupted herself with a dramatic gesture, “Sakumo-shishou and I have been in worse scrapes than that, I acknowledge that, but in our defense, the man regenerated… Completely, with a lethal wound, that was surprising.”

 

Lee paused, waiting for interjections from her audience, but all of them were perfectly silent, Jiraiya not having much to say, except for the idea that of course Lee was somehow inadvertently responsible for all of it.

 

Because that was just such a goddamn Lee thing to do.

 

“Right, well, I will admit that we were in dire straits,” Lee finally said, “While I was knocked out I was prepared as the latest and greatest virgin sacrifice, complete with flowers in my hair, and Sakumo-shishou was whipped against a post and forced to drink some kind of potion equivalent to the Blood of Kali…”

 

“The blood of what?” Jiraiya asked.

 

“The Blood of Kali, you know from Temple of Doom, there was a whole theme on this mission,” Lee brushed off with a wave of her hand.

 

“Lee, keep in mind, I’ve never read your rendition of Temple of Doom,” Jiraiya pointed out, he’d actually read none of her strange transcribed English films turned books that were slowly but surely translated by her and Minato.

 

“What? Oh, you should, it’s very good,” Lee paused then and acknowledged, “Though Raiders of the Lost Ark is better… As is perhaps the Last Crusade, but Temple of Doom is nothing to be sneezed at either.”

 

“Your mission, Lee,” the nidaime prompted rather impatiently, although Jiraiya didn’t know what had his panties in a bunch, he’d probably read the mission report weeks ago.

 

Lee blinked, nodded, then picked up where she left off, which apparently was at the climax of her mission gone wrong, “Right, so Sakumo-shishou was forced into drinking the Blood of Jashin, which put him under this nasty genjutsu which basically turned him into a mindless Jashinist zombie intent on boiling me alive, and that’s about when I started to wake back up…”

 

* * *

 

Lee blinked awake, slowly, crawling her way out of unconsciousness to blurred fog, sweat pouring down her skin, and slowly, Hatake Sakumo’s face appearing outside the mist of the boiling water and sulfur, “Shishou?”

 

His eyes… There was nothing in them, no hint of a soul, of the man who had basically become a father to her.

 

“Shishou?”

 

He said nothing, seemed incapable of saying anything, instead, he moved towards her, towards the cage she now realized she was trapped in, her limbs chained to the walls and sealed with fuinjutsu.

 

A slow dread worm of panic unfurled in her stomach and rose upwards past her lungs to squeeze around her heart.

 

“Shishou, please, don’t do it.”

 

Around them were cheering cultists, actively waiting for Lee’s horrifying demise, and Hatake Sakumo ready to subdue her if she made the slightest movement forward, caught in some monstrous genjutsu without a hint of a way out.

 

And for a single pure instant, the metal of the chains burning her wrists, Lee had the terrible calm epiphany that she was going to have to kill her own master.

 

If she wanted to leave this alive, or rather, if she wanted to keep her S-ranked secret, she was going to have to kill her master.

 

And then, a choice, one that seemed already made before even processed making it. Lee closed her eyes, breathed out, and prepared herself as the cage lowered into the water, as Sakumo tore her still beating heart from her chest and then, scalded by the water, blinked and in horror realized what he had just done to his own apprentice, her heart still dripping wet in his hand.

 

And it was agony, for a terrible paniful, moment it was pain like nothing else had ever been.

 

Then, the scent of fruit in summer, the twilight of the world, and the Yggdrasil above her stretching on into all that ever was or had been. For a moment she stood, bare feet in the grass, Death waiting behind her on the roots of the great tree, then, determination in her fingertips she returned to the world of the living, climbing out untouched from the water, body glowing fiercely like the dawn, raining death with a single gesture onto the regenerator and every Jashinist who followed him, sparing only one, a cowering child, pale haired and dark eyed, half the age of Lee herself, cloaked in dark baggy clothing with Jashin’s simplistic triangle drawn on them.

 

“I have had word with your god and master and I think it’s high time that he formed a new covenant with your people,” Lee stated, no, commanded as a glowing god herself down onto this cowering murderous child, “He has given ten commandments unto you and whatever unfortunate bastards you call kin. One, thou shalt have no other gods before him. Two, thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Three, thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.”

 

Lee stepped closer to him, her eyes seeming to burn out of her own skull as he looked up at her in terror and wonder, “Four, remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.”

 

She leaned over him, watching as he shrank away from her, shielding his eyes from the light still burning off her skin, “Five, honor thy father and thy mother.”

 

She stopped then, the air stopping with her, holding its breath as it waited for her next commandment, the one that she said softly and with killing intent in her own words to brand it on this cultist boy’s brain for the rest of his life, “Six, thou shalt not kill.”

 

She stepped backwards, once, twice, towards Sakumo who was looking at her still in horror, her heart still in his hand, cold now, “Seven, thou shalt not commit adultery. Eight, thou shalt not steal. Nine, thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor. Finally, the tenth, thou shat not covet.”

 

“And if you happen to break the word of your dread cannibalistic god,” Lee said as she finally reached her own master, stealing the cloak of a Jashinist and wrapping it around herself as she did so, “Then even I don’t know what might happen, except perhaps that your rivers may run red with the blood of the children you and yours have murdered, fire may hurtle itself down from the sky, locusts may devour your crops and disease your animals, and every firstborn among you and yours might just perish in his wrath.”

 

Then, supporting Sakumo with one arm and turning away from the scene, from the ashes of all the dead girls, the dust that had been the bodies of the Jashinists themselves, and this lone boy left in their wake, Lee said one last time, “Don’t fuck with a god, brat, it typically doesn’t end well.”

 

She then leaned over, whispering in Sakumo’s ear, “It’s fine, I’m fine, it was just a flesh wound and we both knew that.”

 

And, just like that, her barefoot with a stolen cloak on her shoulders, they walked back to that impoverished village on the edge of the wasteland, ready to tell them of the funeral they needed to have for all their missing daughters and the plague of Jashinists that wouldn’t trouble them any longer.

 

* * *

 

“They must have killed the other girls at some point, in some less ridiculous manner to speed things along, when I was passed out and shishou was a mindless zombie,” Lee noted with a shrug as she wrapped up her story, “Neither of us are too sure, just that by the time I came to they were all already dead even though there had been at least five or so left before our whole fight. Probably they figured I was worth ten-thousand civilian virgins, which, well, is true.”

 

She then sighed looking like this was all just such a pain to relate, not like she’d died or anything, then resurrected herself like a god in front Jashinists only to slaughter them all, “I also didn’t realize that apparently, Jashinists are a little like cockroaches, or… I didn’t get all of them, there must be some other colony or whatever you call a herd of cultists somewhere else in the country. And instead of spreading the word, like I’d hoped the kid would do, he goes running to them and they declare me an avatar of Jashin or something. So shishou and I get back, all appears to be well, and then a few days later these assholes show up… They’ve been here ever since.”

 

Well, that was a… story. A very Lee story, traumatizing and ridiculous in equal measure, but a story none the less. God, Jiraiya would have to check in with Sakumo next, the man was probably still a wreck if half of what Lee had said was true.

 

“And, after all that, you still think you don’t have to talk to them?”

 

And then they were off to the races, bickering again, Lee stating that just because she may have gone a bit overboard in instilling the fear of god into cultist children did not mean that they were now her responsibility or something and the nidaime stating that Lee was clearly the only one they would listen to at this point and goddammit she had to do something about it.

 

And Jiraiya himself was just left with the strange, terrifying, thought that if Lee truly was their new god or avatar or whatever, and they didn’t haul ass back to the Land of Hot Springs, then they might, just might, end up becoming Konoha nin.

 

… Well, one thing was for certain, nobody would be calling Konoha shinobi tree huggers afterwards.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a side fic asking for Lee meeting up with the Jashinists. So of course it turned into the one of the other Indiana Jones movie not covered thus far in the main fic.
> 
> Thanks for reading, comments, kudos, and bookmarks are greatly appreciated.


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